THE ETHICS OF DOCTRINAL CHRISTIANITY: AN IDEAL OF RIGHT BELIEF
[Sidenote: Ethical import of the
Christianization of Rome]
The establishment of Christianity, in its Greco-Judaic form, as the
favored religion of the Roman Empire by the edict of the Emperor
Constantine is rightly regarded as one of the most important events
not only in the history of the Empire but also in that of the Western
world. What made this act, or rather the religious revolution it
registered, of such transcendent importance was the fact that the
ascendancy of the new religion meant the ascendancy of a new moral
ideal; for Christianity, unlike Stoicism, did not merely act upon
the old classical ideal of excellence to modify and remold it, but
superseded it by another made up largely of a wholly different set of
virtues.
It was this new ethical element thus introduced into Greco-Roman
civilization which was the most dynamic of the forces active in the
transformation of the ancient into the medieval world. The new ideal
re-created ethically the Roman world and made Europe for a thousand
years and more--until the Renaissance of the fifteenth century called
forth again the ethical thought and feeling of classical antiquity--in
moral conviction and striving an extension of Asia.
A prerequisite to an intelligent study of the history of this new moral
ideal is a knowledge of the beliefs and theological doctrines out of
which it arose; for this ideal has through the centuries followed the
fortune of these beliefs and teachings. In the immediately following
pages we shall indicate what were some of the most influential of these
ideas and doctrines.
I. RELIGIOUS IDEAS AND THEOLOGICAL DOGMAS MOLDING THE IDEAL
[Sidenote: The doctrine of a moral
law supernaturally revealed]
Among the doctrines of Christian theology freighted heavily with
ethical consequences was that of a moral law supernaturally
promulgated. This was essentially an Oriental conception, a heritage
of Christianity from the Hebrew past, and a conception quite alien in
general to the manner of thinking of the Greeks and Romans, with whom
morality, as we have seen, was a civic and secular and human thing, an
expression of man’s essential nature, that is, an outcome of the human
reason and conscience.
This doctrine exercised an immense influence upon the moral
evolution in the Western world. First, it displaced naturalism with
supernaturalism in ethics. The whole history of morals records no
revolution more momentous than this. Second, it made rigid large
sections of the moral code and thus tended to impart for an historical
epoch a certain immobility to the religious-ethical side of European
civilization.
[Sidenote: The teaching of the
unity of God and of his universal
fatherhood]
Another idea found in this body of religious doctrines, an idea rich
in ethical consequences, was the conception of God as one and as the
Universal Father. We have seen that the great defect in primitive
morality was the limited range of the moral feelings. The circle of
moral obligation was bounded by the clan, the tribe, the city. This
resulted in large part from the notion that each kin group had an
origin and ancestry different from that of every other. One group
thought themselves to be the offspring of Zeus; another proclaimed
themselves to be the descendants of Heracles; and still another
believed themselves to be the children of Mars. So long as this view
of men’s origin and descent prevailed there could arise no conception
of their spiritual relationship and ethical oneness. Tacitus merely
expressed the common opinion of the ancient world when he declared
absurd the doctrine that all men are brothers.
But from the doctrine of the common fatherhood of God there arises
naturally the conception of the essential brotherhood of men. The
apostle’s declaration, “We are the offspring of God,”[624]--phrasing
the teachings of the Master in terms understood by the men to whom he
spoke,--announced the opening of a new era in the moral development of
the race. The proclamation of this practically new thought[625] meant,
at once in ethical theory and sooner or later in actual practice, the
widening of the narrow class and race circle of moral obligation to
include all tribes and peoples.
[Sidenote: The doctrine of a
future life of rewards and
punishments]
Greco-Roman morality was influenced but slightly by a belief in a
life after death. The vision of the other world was in general too
indistinct for it to exert any decided influence upon the conduct of
men.[626] The conception of Hades, though it did undergo with the lapse
of time a process of moralization, was never so far ethicalized as to
have a positive moral value.
But by Christianity the other world was lifted into such prominence as
it had had in the life and thought of no people of antiquity except
the Egyptians, and immortality was declared to be the destiny of every
human soul. With the classical peoples it was the city which had been
conceived as eternal. This transference of immortality from the city
to the individual had vast import for morality.[627] What contributed
to render it of such ethical importance was the fact that the after
life was conceived as a life of rewards and punishments. A heaven
of ineffable and everlasting bliss and a hell of unutterable and
everlasting torment were laid open to the eyes of men, and became the
tremendous sanctions of the new moral code promulgated by Christianity.
It would be difficult to exaggerate the influence of this teaching
upon the moral life of the European peoples, especially during the
medieval centuries of faith. To make this life transitory, vain, and
worthless, and life in another world the only real life, is to cause
the transvaluation of all moral values, and to change fundamentally
conceptions of what is rational and right in conduct.
[Sidenote: The teaching of the
sanctity of human life]
Springing naturally from the foregoing conceptions of man’s origin and
eternal destiny is the Christian doctrine of the sanctity of human
life. In no respect do Christian teachings contrast more sharply with
pagan conceptions than in this regard. In the Greco-Roman view value
did not attach to man as man. To the Greek way of thinking it was
the Greek freeman alone who possessed the full capacity for virtue
and the rights of manhood. In the common Roman view only the Roman
citizen was regarded as dowered with the full faculties and rights of a
human being. The slave was looked upon and treated as belonging to an
inferior order of existence.
The Christian doctrine of man’s divine sonship and of his eternal
destiny gave infinite worth to every human life, and, investing man as
man with an inviolable sanctity, worked effectively in widening the
range of the moral sympathies and in bringing within the scope of the
moral law all classes and conditions of men. It checked infanticide,
which in the pre-Christian world had been very generally practiced
without the least moral scruple; it suppressed the gladiatorial games
in which the lives of men were placed on a level with those of the wild
beasts with which they fought; it helped to make suicide, which the
Romans looked upon as a noble mode of departure from life, a crime; and
contributed to mitigate the lot of the slave and finally to help lift
him into freedom.
[Sidenote: The dogma of the fall
of man and hereditary guilt]
The view of man’s moral nature taught by the Founder of Christianity
was simple and natural. It is embodied in the parable of the prodigal
son. Man may go wrong, but he has ever the capacity, and, when he comes
to himself, the desire, to return to the right way.
In direct opposition to this view of man’s nature and deepest
preferences as being essentially good, we find elaborated in early
Christian theology the dogma that the first man, though created
upright, fell through disobedience and transmitted to all his
descendants a nature wholly evil and a total incapacity for doing good
or even desiring the good. And not only was man thus attainted by the
primal disobedience, but all nature became accursed.
This dogma of the fall of man is one of the most influential
conceptions in the moral domain ever entertained by the human mind.
It was the germ from which was developed the larger part of Christian
theological ethics.[628] For out of the dogma of ancestral sin and
total depravity sprang naturally and logically the doctrines of the
atonement, imputed righteousness, and salvation through faith. The
moral history of the Christian centuries we shall find to be largely
the history of the influence of this doctrine upon men’s conceptions
of their religious obligations and duties. As with the passage of
time and the incoming of evolutionary science the belief in this
teaching decays, we shall find men’s idea of what constitutes duty in
the religious sphere undergoing a great change, and shall see acts,
observances, and states of mind once regarded as supremely virtuous and
indispensable to salvation now looked upon as morally indifferent or
even positively wrong.
[Sidenote: The doctrine of the
sacredness of the Sabbath]
Christianity inherited from Judaism the belief in the sacred character
of the Sabbath day. This belief created one of the most important of
the religious duties of the Christian. It determined how one seventh
of all his time should be spent. The history of the observance of
this Sabbath as holy time, and the changed moral value attached to
such observance as times and beliefs have changed, forms a chapter
of the greatest suggestiveness to the student of the evolution of
morals, since this chapter epitomizes and repeats the entire history of
ceremonial or ritual morality.
[Sidenote: The personality of the
Prophet of Nazareth[629]]
But far more influential than all these inherited Jewish beliefs
and doctrines of speculative theology in molding the moral ideal of
Christianity, in all that renders it superior to the moral ideals of
the other great religions of the world, as well as in all that it
possesses of permanent ethical value for humanity, has been the simple
appealing story of the words and deeds of the Prophet of Nazareth.[630]
Those elements of the ideal which are based on speculative theological
doctrines have changed as these doctrines have changed with the
world’s advance in general intelligence and with the deepening and
clarifying of the moral consciousness of men; while those elements
derived from that wonderful personality, from that life of unbounded
tenderness and love and self-forgetting service, have been given an
ever higher and more dominant place in the world’s ideal of goodness.
In the eloquent words of the historian Lecky: “It was reserved for
Christianity to present to the world an ideal character, which through
all the changes of eighteen centuries has inspired the hearts of men
with an impassioned love; has shown itself capable of acting on all
ages, nations, temperaments, and conditions; has been not only the
highest pattern of virtue but the strongest incentive to its practice;
and has exercised so deep an influence that it may be truly said that
the simple record of three short years of active life has done more
to regenerate and to soften mankind than all the disquisitions of
philosophers and the exhortations of moralists. This has indeed been
the well-spring of whatever is best and purest in Christian life.”[631]
II. THE MORAL IDEAL
[Sidenote: Orthodoxy, or
correct religious opinion, the
indispensable saving virtue[632]]
Before the end of the third century, under the influence largely
of the speculative Greek spirit, what was to be essentially the
historical creed of the Church had been practically formulated and the
corresponding moral code brought into existence.[633] In the creation
of this standard of goodness which was to give guidance for an epoch to
the moral life of the European peoples, it was the theological doctrine
of the moral value of faith, which came practically to be defined as
“the acceptance of the dogma of the Trinity and the main articles
of the creed,” that determined the precedence and subordination of
virtues and duties.[634] Correct belief was made an indispensable
virtue. Without this there could be no salvation.[635] On the other
hand, unbelief, doubt, error, even honest error, in religious matters
was declared to be in the highest degree sinful. This conception that
belief is a virtue and doubt a sin was destined, since it imperils
freedom of thought, to have momentous and sinister consequences for the
intellectual and moral history of Europe.
[Sidenote: The virtue of charity
or love]
Just as the theological dogma of the ethical value of religious
opinions has made correct belief theoretically the saving virtue in
Church ethics, so has the personality of Jesus, his teachings and his
self-sacrificing life as mirrored in the gospel records, made love and
service of others, in multitudes of souls, practically the supreme and
controlling motive of life. It was the emphasis placed by primitive
Christianity on this virtue, and the persuasion to its practice
afforded by the example of the Master, that for the first two centuries
of the new era--until the emphasis became changed from right living
to right opinion--lent to the moral life in the Christian communities
of the Empire such sincerity, purity, and elevation as have marked no
other period in the history of the Church.
But orthodox theology has never allowed that charity, though combined
with perfect uprightness of life and expressed in noblest acts of
self-abnegating service of humanity, is a saving virtue unless
associated with correctness of religious belief and the outgrowth
of it. This opposition in the bosom of the Church itself between
theological and natural morality has created a great dualism in the
moral history of all the Christian centuries, like the dualism in
ancient Hebrew history caused by the opposition between the morality of
ritualism and the morality of prophetism.
[Sidenote: The body of secondary
virtues]
Alongside the primary Christian virtue, whether this be regarded as
correct belief or as charity, were grouped a cluster of secondary
virtues, such as humility, meekness, gentleness, compassion for
weakness, resignation, and renunciation of the world. What is
especially noteworthy respecting this body of moral qualities making up
the Christian ideal of excellence is that all these were virtues which
in general were undervalued or held in positive disesteem by the Greeks
and Romans.[636] Indeed it was made a matter of reproach to the early
Christians by the pagan opponents of Christianity, that its virtues
were all servile virtues--the virtues of the slave.
It was undoubtedly this character of the new ideal which caused it,
in the primal age of Christianity, to make such strong appeal to the
common people, to the despised and lowly, to the broken and humble in
spirit, in the aristocratically graded society of the ancient world.
[Sidenote: Creation of specific
types through modifications of the
general ideal]
The Christian ideal of excellence has fulfilled itself in many ways;
that is, different types have arisen through the shifting in rank of
the virtues constituting the ideal, through the incorporation of pagan
elements, through racial influence, and through the reaction upon the
ideal of the changing intellectual, political, and economic environment.
Generally these specific forms of the ideal have been created by an
exaggerated enthusiasm for one or another particular virtue of the
standard, which has caused this special virtue so to overshadow all the
others, save the indispensable one of correct belief, as to bring into
existence a distinctive Christian type. Thus through the exaltation
of the virtue of chastity there arose in the early Church the ascetic
type of excellence, which for several centuries inspired unbounded
moral enthusiasm and drew away into the desert and into the seclusion
of the cloister great multitudes of both men and women; later, through
the reaction upon the Church of the pagan and barbarian world it had
nominally converted, and through the incorporation into the ideal of a
number of heathen virtues, there came into existence a composite type
of character--a combination of the virtues of the saint and the virtues
of the hero--known as the chivalric ideal, which colored the events of
European history from the ninth to the fourteenth century; and still
later, through the suppression of some of the distinctive virtues of
the Roman Catholic type of excellence and a fresh emphasis laid upon
others, there was created the Protestant type of moral character, which
has given a special cast to the theological morality of a large section
of modern Christendom.
[Sidenote: Limitations and defects
of the ideal]
That we may better be prepared to follow intelligently the various
phases of the moral history of the Christian centuries, to the tracing
of which the remaining chapters of this volume will be devoted, there
is need that to the brief description we have now given of the chief
virtues making up the ideal which was to give guidance to the moral
life of the European peoples, we add a word concerning its limitations
and defects, since these negative qualities of the ideal have exercised
an influence scarcely less decisive than its positive qualities in
making the history of the Christian world what it has been--a history,
on the whole, of inspiring moral progress, yet a history of moral
losses as well as of moral gains.
The first limitation of the ideal which we notice is its practical
exclusion of those civic, patriotic duties and virtues which had
been so highly esteemed by both the Greeks and the Romans. Man was
henceforth to be the citizen of no earthly city, but of a heavenly
city whose builder and maker is God. We can easily understand how this
new conception of life, which transferred all its chief interests to
another world, which substituted the Church--symbolized in accordance
with the modes of thought of the time as “the city of God”--for the
ancient city state as the object of moral enthusiasm and self-devotion,
should leave no place for those civic, military, and heroic virtues
that had constituted the very soul of the morality of classical
antiquity.
A second limitation of the ideal is its neglect of the intellectual
virtues, which by the Greeks had been assigned such a high place in
their ethical standard.[637] The slighting of this important domain of
ethics by Christian theology arose naturally from its exaltation of
faith above reason, and from its assumption that in the revealed word
the Church was already in possession of all knowledge really essential
to man’s welfare and salvation.[638]
But the chief defect of the ideal, the lamentable historical
consequences of which we shall witness later, is, as we have already
pointed out, in its making the acceptance of all the articles of a
given creed an indispensable virtue. In assigning orthodox belief
this place in the ideal of moral goodness, theological ethics has
marred Christian morality by fostering the faults of intolerance and
intellectual insincerity. This dogma inspired in the Church, as soon
as it became powerful, a persecuting spirit, and made Christianity for
centuries something altogether alien to its real genius and spirit--one
of the most intolerant of the world’s religions. At the same time
this dogma, by making religious unbelief and nonconformity a sin so
heinous as to be worthy of death by the most exquisite torture, and
of everlasting punishment in the hereafter, discouraged intellectual
veracity and open-mindedness, and fostered the vice of insincere
conformity, which, more than any other fault, has marred Church
morality from the end of the early age of the martyrs to the present
day.
[Sidenote: Conclusion]
In the following pages we shall follow the fortunes of this ethical
ideal through medieval and modern times. We shall trace the modifying
influence upon it of the different and changing elements of the
civilization of which it has formed a part, and shall note the reaction
of the ideal, in its successive types, upon the history of the passing
centuries.